Raspbian Stretch released based on Debian Stretch

When it is about to complete two years after release of Raspbian Jessy, Raspbian team has announced release of Raspbian Stretch, latest stable release of Debian based GNU/Linux distribution targeting Raspberry Pi devices. The two year gap between consequent releases is inherited from the Debian itself. Debian publishes a major release in every two year.

Comparing to Debian Jessy, changes in Stretch are almost invisible. Still we can summarize it as package updates and under the hood improvements. Though, there has been some significant updates in Raspbian images. These improvements includes:

Sonic Pi 3.0.1which comes with a lot of functionalities for I/O operations.

Chromium web browser has been updated to version 60, which consumes less amount of memory and CPU. You may also experience slight performance improvement.

bluez-alsa package is included to make bluetooth audio to work with ALSA itself.

You can use other user names other than default one 'pi'. Earlier, a lot of applications used to assume pi as default user. It has been changed. You can also provide sudo access to users other than pi.

Off line version of scratch 2 is included. It comes with extension for sense hat. If a Sense HAT is connected, the extension will control that in preference to the emulator.

Includes patch to fix vulnerability in the firmware of the BCM43xx wireless chipset which is used on Pi 3 and Pi Zero W

For more detailed change logs and screenshots see original release announcement published in Rapbian website.